Circuit
by TheAUWalker
Summary: It was the unthinkable that something like this could happen to the person closest to his heart, unthinkable that he had not protected him from it. OOQ, one-shot. Skyfall, post Silva.


They had never imagined it would be like this.

Honestly Bond had no idea what the hell Q was thinking, what was going through his head when it happened-but he knew it wasn't pleasant, and it pained him to think that he was sleeping when they were killing him.

Q wasn't really dead.

But he wasn't human. Maybe, part of his nature was still deep down there, buried in circuit boards and wires. The Quartermaster had been made into software, his body long used and dead and burned somewhere.

They had just found his laptop, normal day at work, on and unlocked, screen on a blank document that was rapidly filling up with text when the lights turned on and the agents came in. No one could get the laptop to stop spitting out words.

Even pulling the plug didn't work and no one had bothered to try and read it until Moneypenny put her hand firmly on one of the men's chest and pointed sharply at the screen.

It was frenzied, panicked, a sick joke at first. It was impossible to put a person into a computer, to twine their DNA and genes into it, their personality and intelligence. You could put something into it, make it seem like the person was talking to you and be controlling it a thousand miles away.

But that's not what was.

They stopped trying to get it to shut off and typed back, interrupting the stream of jumbled words that no one understood and asking it what it wanted.

The computer promptly responded with something that looked like a scrambled swearword.

It hummed, and half the department abandoned work to try and trace the program and take it apart. M didn't say a word against it, his eyes holding something strange.

After they had taken it apart it took a while to boot back up and the program was swearing at them and telling them to stop and it was all so jumbled they had to have someone sit and try and decipher what was being said. Eventually they figured out the general gist of it.

It was disturbing.

Quartermaster the computer, body long gone and mind forced into a piece of technology, the very one his fingers had skimmed over. He requested to be connected to the network and there was a long silence in the department. If it was a virus, it could destroy them.

But it really could be Q.

The search for him yielded no results, and security tapes showed him leaving the department last, as usual, walking a bit oddly but nothing else out of the ordinary.

He was spitting passwords at them, things that nobody else could get out of him, torture or not, and so they simply connected.

He went up on the big screen, a new document, and lines of text started appearing so fast that someone spoke out, instinctively.

"Slow down, Q."

The text slowed, and in a more methodical and precise way, there were less and less spelling errors.

He told them what had happened to him, he told them that his body was gone.

He told them that it was uncomfortable being like this, and that there was no way to get him out.

He told them that he would like to see Bond.

They got Bond and the reunion was not happy.

Bond was shouting and Q had stopped typing, was just sort of silent, his laptop's screen drooping a bit.

Bond did not like him for what he had become, what had happened to him, who he was, and it tore Q apart.

He did not talk for a long while, letting the people work on fully straightening out his system and spelling, grammar, punctuation, his internet connection and speed and responses and reflexes, a system check to make sure that their Quartermaster was going to be okay.

Q was a piece of software.

The best in the world, probably, the smartest and the quickest and the one that could do things that no one else could. It was cruel that he was doomed to life in a computer and no one knew how he felt or if he even could feel, how much human was left.

Bond was given leave from work.

People finally told him to pull it together, get a grip, that he wasn't entirely dead, and people went to the hospital with black eyes.

Bond came in, after hours, when Q was still whirring along because no one wanted to shut him down. He would sleep, sometimes, monitors black, and it was only the noise of the fan or random clicks and beeps that showed he was still there.

Q would be asleep and Bond would come and sit.

Q was blind and deaf, the only sense he had of people was light. Light reflecting off his monitor and the lights in the room and light poking through the open spaces between the keys. He could hear voices, sometimes, but not enough to puzzle through people's speech. He stayed in his room and talked through a document.

Things were grim, somber, sideways glances cast at the computer.

There were talks about putting Q out of his misery but M flatly refused. He said that any attempt to sabotage him would turn very regretful for the persons involved.

Soon, Q figured out that Bond was there.

He could pretend to be asleep and just know that Bond was there, hear the faint sounds of his breathing, and know that when the lights would shut off there would be a small pat on the back of his screen.

No one really knew what to say when Q requested to die.

It was so formal that visions of bubbling battery acid and downloaded viruses flooded their minds, ways he could end himself.

He had gotten sick, before, a minor virus wrecking small havoc on his system. But not sick like this.

No one could answer him.

It was cruel to keep him like that but cruel to shut him down.

Someone said it ought to be Q's choice.

Eve cried, a bit, even though she had never known Q well, and Bond didn't speak at all. Turning him off was painful, sleeping was painful, using him was painful, and Q had become slow and was making more mistakes despite their best efforts.

Bond remembered Q's glasses and his hair and his voice, long gone, only present in his mind, and it was his fault.

They were trying to get to Bond by ripping Q away, the one thing that had mattered.

-o-o-o

Bond was drunk.

He knew it, everyone knew it, and everyone also hit the floor.

No one tried to stop him because he had that dangerous look in his eye and they knew someone would get shot if they stepped in his way. It was a tragedy, Eve really did cry, she pleaded from her position on the floor.

Q couldn't hear very well, but he heard that.

He heard the shot ring out and a bottle crash to the floor and someone crying and a cold feeling swept through his system and he knew who was dead.

There was a beep.

"No, Q!"

They were yelling and he was beeping and clicking and shutting himself down, letting blackness take over and acid and pain flood his brain and he destroyed himself.

He knew that was what they wanted. They wanted both Bond and Q and they could have easily shot them both, but that was not displaying power like they wanted.

One could not go without the other.

-o-o-o

Bond had missed a direct shot, by a millimeter, and the blood was slowly draining out of him and leaving him heaving on the cold floor and wishing for Q and he could hear him shutting down, people's shouts.

There was a loud, earsplitting beep in his right ear and despite the bullet in his body Bond winced at the noise.

There was a smaller beep, and then a smaller one.

Q was dying.

Bond was dying.

007 pressed a shaky hand to his ear, holding on to the one thing that had mattered.

They fell together.


End file.
